by Kerri Rawson
Love,
Kerri
At the end of July, I received a letter from Dad after I wrote and mailed mine.
July 27
Dear Kerri,
Forgive me for missing your wedding anniversary on July 26. I had it marked down and meant well, but didn’t get it done. So, this card (made by another inmate) cost me a Snickers bar, will be the wish.
This Sunday PM, after supper, I’m in my room with fresh cup of coffee and finishing letters and correspondence. Wrote Brian last week to wish him his birthday wish. Well, I’m glad you, Brian and Darian had a good time back east. Brian last letter spoke of positive time. He is always so positive and upbeat.
The lien on the house has caused a wedge between me and defense. They mention nothing of this early as we try to make decisions on a non-guilty or plea. I wanted Mom out of harm from the onset. I cooperated with the police, I cooperated with the court, to save tax payers millions and family wishes on plea. And then they screw me with a lien. It’s out of my hand. I’m still very upset. And trust no one in the legal world anymore.
I understand Mom has moved. Her letters are brief and she may not see me for a long time. I can write, but will be writing to a brick wall? Kerri, will that be the same for you? I hope not!
Just a few lines, to let me know what going on helps. Maybe after sentencing and the dust settle, Mom and the rest of the family will write.
The crime did sell you and the rest out, but I’m still family and need a little letter support if nothing else.
I be shutting down here each day. Cleaning up room, etc. Soon, El Dorado, “old soldier’s home!”
I always hope for open letter from Mom, but afraid that is gone, she was open until the plea, then it dropped.
Please write, if nothing but thanks.
Love to you!
Dad
JULY
DETROIT
Dad had written: “By the way, you should contact a lawyer and sue Wichita-KBI-FBI, for obtaining your DNA without your permission. I don’t hold that aspect of the crime/evidence against you.”
No words would come close to describing how angry that made me: He didn’t hold my DNA against me? Well, how mighty big of him.
“That aspect of the crime/evidence.”
Uh, his crimes. His evidence.
“Please write, if nothing but thanks.”
No. Not going to thank you for pleading guilty to what you were guilty of. Taking ten lives.
I tucked away his letters from this time period for ten years. I didn’t even know these words still existed till I accidentally came across them in the summer of 2015:
Want you to know I do not hate you or don’t love you. The problems I have are far away from family love. I know they hurt and hopefully, someday your heart will mend and you can forgive me. You will always be my baby girl I raised right-proud-independent and now is a grown adult with many years of love to give . . . I’m so glad we had that family vacation in May 2004. So many memories! Life before the arrest was a good time, and the dark side took me away.
AUGUST
I accepted a full-time job as a coffee barista at a nearby Borders bookstore in August. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a paycheck.
I didn’t bother to tell anyone I was the daughter of the serial killer featured in the newspapers and magazines stacked by the front counter.
I did come home smelling of espresso beans, though.
AUGUST 17
My dad’s two-day sentencing hearing in August was almost the death of me. I figured it would be a simple declaration from the judge of how many years my dad had been sentenced to.
I was woefully unprepared.
At his plea hearing in June, my dad’s account of his crimes was horrifying, but he glossed over aspects of the murders, minimizing his torture of victims. It was a one-sided, narcissistic view.
Considering my dad’s narrow telling, the public’s need to hear the full truth, and the victims’ families’ rights to closure, the prosecutors decided to go forward with a full disclosure of my dad’s reign of terror. They checked with the victims’ families before proceeding, making sure they were okay with a full release of the evidence. None of them objected.1
But the prosecution didn’t check in with this family. The eighth family.
I found out later that others had come to the defense of our innocent family, asking if there was an actual need to do this. Wouldn’t it embarrass my family further?2 Shame us? Hurt us?
No one asked or warned us it was coming.
Over a two-day period, the detectives who had worked the cases went into gut-wrenching descriptions of each murder from the witness stand. They showed actual murder weapons, crime scene photos, and brought to light photos of my dad in self-bondage.
I couldn’t stomach watching this horror live, but I read through the court transcripts later in the Eagle and caught video clips online. A national TV audience tuned in out of morbid curiosity.
But I wasn’t the public. I am his daughter. I know his tube socks. I know his legs.
And I know where some of the pictures were taken. For example, my grandparents’ basement, where I ran around with cousins and where we celebrated holiday after holiday.
I continue to wonder: After Brian and I conked out in our three-man tent set up on a sandbar at Lake Cheney, had Dad possibly dug a hole and tied himself up?
I don’t have any solid answers to that horrible thought. Nor do I have answers to what still terrorizes me awake at night.
In hindsight, I understand why the prosecution—the detectives—did what they did. My father degraded ten people, including two children, beyond comprehension. But he was still my father, and I loved him—no matter what he had done.
AUGUST 18
The families were given the opportunity to give statements after the prosecution finished. (I still have not read those transcripts. I tried once, ten years later; I made it a few lines in and almost threw up.)
After the families made their statements, my father was given a chance to make a final statement—to show remorse. Instead, he selfishly rambled on for twenty minutes, in a speech nicknamed “the Golden Globes” in Wichita. I listened to some of it and read a transcript of the rest.
Dad stood up in court and called us—my mom, my brother, and I—social contacts, pawns in his game.
Dad taught me and my brother chess, using the beautifully carved stone set he brought back from Asia while he was in the air force. He patiently showed us how each piece moved, and I can still recall the earthy smell of the brown-and-white checkered board. When you opened the box, you were met with knights, bishops, rooks, kings, and queens, and, yes, pawns, resting in soft red-felt lining.
My family lived with—and loved—this man for decades. We fed him, did his laundry, and took care of him when he was sick and injured. I adored him. Even though he could be a brute.
And now he called us “social contacts.”
How dare he.
He could rot in hell.
That speech of his was the last time I would ever hear his voice.
I cut off all communication with him and tried to distance myself from the news.
They were saying BTK—my serial killer father—was a sexual, sadistic psychopath.
But I was in no condition to begin to understand what any of it really meant. What I did understand was Dad had lied to us, betrayed us, every day since my brother and I were born.
Every day since my mom met him—he knew what he was capable of, what he was.
He should have never gotten married or had children.
I shouldn’t be alive.
He should have checked himself into a mental hospital and never left.
He should have turned himself in before he took the lives of the Otero family.
After he murdered, he should have turned himself in to the police.
He should have been in jail the past thirty-one years.
People should still be alive.
But my brother and I wouldn’t be.
I was okay with that—I’d trade my life for theirs.
AUGUST 19
WICHITA
The morning after my father was sentenced, he was driven by the sheriff’s department to the El Dorado Correctional Facility thirty minutes east of Wichita.
It was a route my father knew well, and the last time he’d ever get to take it.
The Kansas prairie was an unexpected green for so late in the summer, the sky was blue, and my father’s life, as anything he had ever known or wanted, was over.
Dad arrived at his final homestead wearing a red jumpsuit, cheap sandals, and chains around his waist, wrists, and ankles. It was a far cry from the nice suit he’d worn to court the day before. Looking weary, thin, and as if he was continuing to age overnight, he shuffled toward the barbed wire–topped walls.
Dad had been sentenced to 175 years in prison. Ten consecutive life sentences. Twenty-three hours a day, alone in a concrete cell in the maximum-security wing, next to death-row inmates. It sure wasn’t the retirement he dreamed of.
In the coming years, well-meaning folks would ask, “How long will your dad be in prison?” I would answer, “For the rest of his lifetime and the one after that.”
PART VII
Binding Up a Broken Heart
He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.
—PSALM 147:3
CHAPTER 39
Keep Faith in the Good
AUGUST 2005
DETROIT
It was over. Dad had been locked away.
And I was done.
After my dad’s sentencing, the past six brutal months of my life slammed down on my soul. A dense, dark gate barred my memories.
Time, and the way I spoke about it, forever divided: before my dad’s arrest—after my dad’s arrest.
Before Dad. After Dad.
There was the before, but it now had a gray, murky tinge: nothing was really ever the way it had seemed. Dad had never really been just Dad.
And now there was the after, waiting on the other side of my dad’s sentencing: a hope, a future, a life. But how could I continue forward with my own life, knowing so many lives had been destroyed by someone I loved?
I had the rest of my life in front of me—they had theirs taken away. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t know how to reckon with the shame I felt over what my dad had done—what he had taken. Guilt-ridden, any choice I made to try to find normalcy felt fake, hollow.
I didn’t have any answers, but I longed for space and time to recover: to mend my wounds, to heal. Tired of grieving, tired of hurting so badly, I couldn’t breathe.
Determined to not deal with any of it anymore, I attempted to gather all that had transpired over the past six months and haphazardly shove it to one side of my mind, one side of my life. I figured if I bandaged the immense ache within me tightly enough, it would eventually heal in time. And I assumed the loop from the day of my dad’s arrest would go away once our lease was up and we could move away from where I had suffered so much.
But hiding the pain away only caused it to fester. And the loop followed me to our new place, where the sliding-glass door to our patio multiplied my fears.
SEPTEMBER
By Labor Day, we were reasonably settled into our new apartment. It came with a washer and dryer, and an address my dad and the media didn’t have, thanks to a post office box.
If you had come across us, you would’ve seen a young couple trying to make their way. Even if you stopped to talk to us, or worked with us, you likely wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss. You wouldn’t have known you were standing next to the daughter of a serial killer.
Yet I knew it, and it continued to traumatize me internally, even if I only showed outward signs occasionally.
God?
A quiet, peaceful little life.
I prayed it over and over.
A week after my dad’s sentencing, I had an interview at a struggling charter school for a first-grade teaching position, for a classroom where the teacher had already quit after two days.
They asked me to teach an off-the-top-of-my-head math lesson. I winged it well enough, was hired on the spot, and stayed the rest of the day as the new teacher. The same day, I quit the coffee job.
I was so happy to finally have my own classroom and a decent paycheck that I didn’t realize what a difficult external challenge I had piled on top of my massive internal ones. I should have heeded my own prayer. And possibly stuck to espresso beans.
There was nothing peaceful about teaching first graders, even in a well-run school. And this was not a well-run school. In hindsight, I have no idea what I was thinking—flinging myself into a teaching environment even seasoned veterans around me struggled in.
The room was bare, so I bought a heap of colorful posters, but the room still looked bleak even after Darian helped me decorate. I bought most of the classroom supplies I needed; my kiddos quickly broke most of the crayons. I scrambled around searching for teaching manuals and begged for two more copies of the daily math sheet. I’d be gone twelve hours, bust my rear scraping together enough curriculum to hold the class together for the next day, and fall into bed at 2:00 a.m.
This insanity wasn’t sustainable, but I didn’t want to quit on my kids—life was already unstable for so many of them. I was so busy during the day and so exhausted at night, Dad and the heartbreak of the past six months took a faraway back seat.
Dad kept sending letters, but I didn’t reply.
September 22
Dear Kerri,
Hope this letter find you and Darian in good spirit and health. The sentencing was too much on my mind and trying to shut down there.
At my level, I can’t order too many stamps. There is talk of garnishment of commissary here, for lawsuits, restitution, and court costs. If so, letters to family will be far and few in-between. I only get four envelopes and stamps per month.
So, I have to write, maybe, every three months or so. You can write often, and if you do, please understand why I don’t write back.
Lawsuit, divorce, house sale—ongoing mess, has caused a strain on Mom, I’m sure. I wish she would write me, if nothing but let me know, if she’s okay and the family. If you write, please let me know what going on.
No TV, radio, or newspaper at level one—that I’m at now. Cannot accept visitors, but on TV screen, weekends, by appointment only.
Please both you and Darian be extra careful due to all my crimes. I would wish no harm to you but some crazy individual might try something. Are you ready for winter? Is the Tempo still running okay? Has Brian gone to fleet yet?
I have a routine now, that helps, and we get to shower and shave 3X a week. Can go outside, for an hour 5x a week, but haven’t yet. There is like a dog run, chain-in area, you can exercise or pull up bar. I read a lot and think of past good memories. Right now, I’m reading Centennial by James Michener. Love his books, I recall you also like his books.
In the event of my death, I wish to be cremated and my ashes spread in the Flint Hills. It’s nice to know where you will be and in God’s hand.
I wish you luck on work and everyday life. Tell Darian, hi for me. God Bless.
Love,
Dad
OCTOBER
Dad had written: “Remember, I love you, you will always be my little girl, my tomboy and best friend. Many-many good memories of you and family. Keep faith in the good: life, hope and love.”
Crying out sobs, those words breached my hardened heart. “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”1
On the evening of October 9, Darian and I sat down to watch a movie on network TV: The Hunt for the BTK Killer. I had to look away during the violent parts, and I still cringe when I see the actor who portrayed my dad in anything else, but it was also surreal stress relief. It was so off in some places about my home and my mom, and so telling in other parts, especially about my dad�
��s oddities, that there wasn’t anything to do but laugh.
Most inappropriate laughter ever.
The best scene was my dad in his brown compliance officer uniform sitting at a counter in a café, ordering milk with his lunch and specifically making a point to ask the waitress for ice. I have no idea how the movie people knew that Dad liked to drink milk with ice in it. But it was brilliant—and I fell over laughing till my sides hurt.
In the fall we adopted two kittens from a rescue. We called the gray fuzz ball who curled up in our arms and purred, Hamlet. Molly was a black-and-orange tortie clinging vertically to her cage, clearly in need of relocation. Hamlet quickly became Hammy, and Molly zipped around our new home, chirping at us and the birds at the feeders I had hung on the patio.
Those kittens were life. They brought joy into our broken hearts, gave us purpose.
Some parts of teaching had gotten easier, but mainly it was exhausting—and a few unexpected aspects downright terrified me.
The school staff parked in a fenced-in lot, but two teachers still had their nice SUVs stolen during school hours. I was just driving the Tempo but grew leery walking to my car on the afternoons I stayed late.
Once there was a threat of school violence, and we gathered for a staff meeting. I realized I didn’t have a key to lock my classroom door, nor was there any sort of lockdown plan. Contemplating how to push a desk and chairs in front of my door and where to tuck children tied my guts in knots.
As a student teacher, I’d gone through training—but everything had changed inside me since then. Violence. Trauma. Crime. Death. It altered me. I wasn’t the same person, and I couldn’t wrap my head around needing to implement my own school safety plan.
Not long after that, I fell asleep one warm afternoon coming home from school, stuck in bumper-to-bumper stalled traffic on I-96. I was startled awake by a honk behind me and drove the next thirty minutes with cold air blasting, shaking my head to clear it. The next morning, driving to school in the early light, tears rolling down my face, I asked God for help.